Just Mercy: A story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson, Spiegel & Grau, 2014.
Gideon picked this week’s book. We had both heard the author interviewed on NPR and thought he sounded fascinating, so I got his book. When this guy had the time to write it I do not know. He got involved in death penalty cases while he was still in law school, and this passion took over his life. You can listen to the NPR interview here and watch his TED talk here.
I found this to be a hard book to read because it’s so heartbreaking but also because there’s no resolution for most if not all of the crimes he discusses. The spine of the book concerns the case of Walter McMillian, a young black man who was tried and sentenced to death for the murder of a young woman and who always insisted that he was innocent.